1. Field of Invention
This invention relates generally to the production of animated films, and in particular to a technique in which the cartoon characters in the film and their movements are created in real time by invisible living actors.
2. Status of Prior Art
The pioneer producers of animated films regarded these films as moving comic strips, and no effort was made on the part of animators to conceal the fact that the characters were just moving drawings. It was Walt Disney who later created characters having humanoid qualities, the characters playing a role in stories, such as the Three Little Pigs and Snow White.
Animated film has its roots in the flipbook in which as one flips the pages, the figures drawn on these pages appear to move. The closer the various parts of a figure on one page are to the positions of corresponding parts of the figure on the preceding page, the slower the apparent motion of the figure, while the greater the displacement, the faster the apparent motion.
The pages of a flip book are bound together to ensure registration. In making drawings for an animated film, in order to maintain registration, the papers on which the drawings are made are provided with punch holes that fit onto pegs anchored on a drawing board. In the center of the drawing board is a glass plate behind which is a light box. The drawing paper is thin and translucent, and when four or five sheets of paper are stacked over the illuminated glass plate, the animator is then able to see the animation on these sheets and he can gauge the position of the animation to be made on the next drawing.
Animation of cartoon characters is a complex procedure. In a commercial animation studio, the principal animator draws the key movements of a cartoon character to be animated. He then numbers the several drawings which cover these movements and annotates them on an exposure sheet. This work is then transferred to an assistant animator who follows the instructions on the exposure sheet and adds more drawings to the set. Then a second assistant animator provides additional "in-between" drawings. In this way, movement of the character takes place from drawing-to-drawing in small increments. The greater the number of drawings covering a particular movement, the less jerky it appears when the animated film is viewed.
The set of drawings produced in this fashion are then photographed in sequence by an animation camera, and the resultant footage is shown in a projection room to the director of the film and the principal animator who make corrections and additions. The revised animation is reshot and screened once again. When the drawings are finally approved, they are transferred to acetate sheets called cels, and these are colored by an artist. The cels, which are transparent, are then combined with background paintings for every scene to provide a complete picture.
After color negatives of the pictures have been made, the color negatives and the sound track prepared for these pictures are sent to a film laboratory where an animation print is struck off.
With modern computer animation, it is now possible to dispense with the services of assistant animators. To do this, the principal animator provides two drawings of a given cartoon character representing the extremes of a particular movement. Thus one drawing could be that of Donald Duck looking very happy, and the other of Donald Duck looking downcast. These two extremes of expression are inputted into the computer which which then proceeds to grind out any desired number of in-between drawings of Donald Duck.
But whether the multitude of drawings necessary to impart animation to a cartoon character are drawn by skilled artists or are in part contributed by a computer, conventional film animation technique and highly complex, time consuming and expensive. Even a short animated film requires thousands of character drawings.